


o brave new moon

by ladymedraut



Category: SHAKESPEARE William - Works, The Tempest - Shakespeare
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, gratuitous space facts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-17
Updated: 2020-02-17
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:54:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22765075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladymedraut/pseuds/ladymedraut
Summary: The Tempest I.i, but in space."There was little Antonio wanted more than to be back in New Milan, on the moon he had called home for as long as he could remember. He’d been away from Europa for longer than he cared to think about, and he shuddered to think about what might have happened to his small dukedom in his absence."
Comments: 2
Kudos: 1





	o brave new moon

There was little Antonio wanted more than to be back in New Milan, on the moon he had called home for as long as he could remember. He’d been away from Europa for longer than he cared to think about, and he shuddered to think about what might have happened to his small dukedom in his absence.

What if part of the city had flooded again? It was known to happen from time to time, since underwater cities were at a rather larger risk for that particular catastrophe than terrestrial cities. Every now and then the tidal stresses exerted by Jupiter on the small, watery moon would prove too much for the bubble-like complex on the ocean floor, especially the older sections of the city and the parts that were located dangerously close to the hydrothermal vents. Luckily, there was a system of gates that usually stopped the flooding before it got too far, but Europa wasn’t exactly the most hospitable place in the solar system.

Oh, Antonio’s moon was _habitable_ enough. The early colonizers who had set out to terraform what worlds they could when the strain of humankind became too much for Earth had done a pretty decent job at making sure the bases they established on various moons would be capable of supporting life for several centuries, or at least until humankind could find some feasible way to travel beyond their own solar system to find planets and moons more suited for life.

The biggest problem with Europa was that it already supported life when humans got there, and that life wasn’t always what one would call “friendly.”

They had expected to find bacteria, maybe some sort of fungus. They’d never received any sort of signal from a complex civilization there, and while scientists had long suspected that the cracked icy surface covered a salt water ocean, there hadn’t been much evidence for carbon and organic compounds. They certainly hadn’t expected to drill through the ice only to find twenty-foot-long blind aquatic worms that hunted through some kind of echolocation and thought humans made a tasty snack.

In short, Antonio was rather displeased to have been uprooted from Europa to spend several months travelling to and from Triton to attend the marriage of Queen Alonsa of Ganymede’s daughter to a Neptunian lord. New Milan was still recovering from the neglect of his brother, Duke Prospero’s, rule, and Antonio would much rather be spending his time reinforcing his capital city’s protective shields against tidal stresses and native sea life than stuck on a star cruiser with Ganymedian royalty. But Queen Alonsa had helped him overthrow Prospero, so he supposed he did owe her some kind of allegiance, and Ganymede was a much more valuable ally than Io--the volcanic hellscape--or Callisto--the big old floating ball of rock and ice and boredom.

“The _Tempest_ will be passing through the rings of Saturn in fifteen minutes. If you wish to see them, please report to the upper viewing deck.”

Antonio did not especially want to see Saturn’s rings, but Alonsa would expect him there and he had to do something to pass the time anyway. And so, as soon as the captain’s announcement was over, Antonio made his way up the lifts to the upper viewing deck of the royal Ganymedian star cruiser _._

“Aren’t they beautiful?” Alonsa commented, staring up as the rings passed by overhead.

“Well, they’re certainly more impressive than Jupiter’s,” the queen’s brother, Sebastian, was saying as Antonio arrived on the deck. “Although I think they look better from farther away.”

Antonio had to agree. Up close, it became clear that Saturn’s rings were just a bunch of rocks and ice floating through space, kept in their orbit by Saturn’s gravity and the help of a few small shepherd moons. 

“How many comets and asteroids and moons and things do you think it took to make these?” Sebastian asked as they flew by beneath Saturn’s rings.

“I don’t know why you’re asking me,” Antonio said. “I can rule a moon, that doesn’t mean I know anything about them breaking up into rings.”

“I was just making conversation, you don’t have to be so grumpy about it.”

Antonio sighed. He really shouldn’t take his annoyance out on Sebastian. Queen Alonsa’s younger brother was usually good company. He knew a good deal about astronomy and was quick to share any interesting facts about the region of the solar system they were passing through with Antonio. Sebastian knew the stars, Antonio knew people—together, they might have ruled the Galilean moons quite well, but unfortunately both of them were younger siblings. Antonio had overthrown his older brother though, so maybe it wasn’t out of the realm of possibilities for Sebastian to find some way to rule as King of Ganymede.

“The last signal I got from Prospero was somewhere around here,” Antonio said. After he had overthrown his brother, Prospero had fled New Milan and Europa with his young daughter, Miranda. The pair had taken a small ship and left the Galilean moons for somewhere beyond Antonio’s sphere of influence. Antonio had managed to put a tracker on their ship though, and he had traced the signal to somewhere in the Saturnian system before it disappeared. Perhaps that had been due to a ship malfunction and Prospero was well and truly gone, but Antonio doubted he had such good fortune as that. It was more likely that Prospero had landed on one of Saturn’s moons, probably one with a thick enough atmosphere that would obscure the ship’s signal from Antonio’s satellites around Europa.

“Do you think he’s still out there?” Sebastian asked, echoing Antonio’s train of thought.

“Oh, I bet he’s somewhere on one of these moons with all of his books. And he can stay there for all that I care.”

It was then that the alarms began to sound.

“What the hell is that?” Alonsa yelled, tearing her eyes away from Saturn’s rings at the harsh screeching sound emanating from the comms system speakers.

“All officers, please report to the bridge. All officers, please report to the bridge.” The captain’s voice over the speaker sounded like it was on the edge of panic. Very reassuring.

“Sebastian, Antonio, with me,” Alonsa ordered, and the two men fell in behind her as she strode toward the lift.

Except the lift wasn’t working.

“Queen Alonsa…” The speakers crackled and died in a burst of static.

Antonio usually wasn’t one for panicking—he dealt with the Europan sea worms on a regular basis, after all—but he felt his chest beginning to constrict as he stared at the immobile lift.

“Did no one think to put a ladder in this thing?” Sebastian grumbled as he wrenched the cover off the control panel and began fiddling with the wires underneath. “Fixed it,” he said after a moment, and the lights in the lift blinked to life again. “Come on, let’s go before it decides to break again.”

With some deal of trepidation, Antonio stepped into the lift. He kept expecting the floor to lurch under his feet and to feel himself plummeting to the bottom of the shaft at any second, but by some miracle they managed to make it to the main deck. Alonsa forced the lift doors open, and the three of them sprinted toward the bridge.

The _Tempest_ was eerily quiet. It took Antonio a moment to realize this wasn’t just because the alarms had stopped with the failing comms system, but also because there was no hum of the engine.

The noise immediately returned as they burst onto the bridge, where the captain was bellowing orders and the responses from the other officers were becoming increasingly frantic.

“Bosun!” the captain snapped at the man passing her. “Find the chief engineer, now.”

The bosun pushed past Antonio, sprinting down toward the engine room as fast as he could run.

“What’s going on?” Alonsa asked the captain.

“You might want to get to the escape pods,” the captain said.

Before them, Antonio saw the large mass of an orangish moon coming into view. They were headed straight for it.

“What’s going on?” he repeated.

“I’m trying to keep this ship from crashing into that moon. Now get to the pods.”

“I’m an engineer, let me help,” Sebastian said, buckling himself into the bosun’s chair.

“Fine, you can stay, but you two should get off the bridge,” the captain snapped.

“Not without him,” Antonio and Alonsa said in unison.

“You can command Ganymede, your majesty, but can you command the solar wind? If you can, please do so now. If not, get off the bridge and get ready for a crash landing.”

Antonio grabbed the back of Sebastian’s chair as the ship shook beneath them. “Can you do anything about this?”

“Um, perhaps not,” Sebastian admitted. “There must have been a pretty strong solar prominence recently. We just got hit by a bunch of highly charged particles that are screwing up all of our electrical systems.”

“Weren’t we supposed to get some sort of warning about this?” Antonio snapped at the captain as the ship lurched beneath his feet and the lights began to flicker.

“Yes, but it’s a little late to be worrying about that now,” the captain retorted, her hands flying over the controls as more and more lights whose purpose Antonio didn’t entirely understand flickered and went out.

“Captain!” shouted one of the other men on the bridge. “We’re getting pretty close to that moon—”

Antonio knew very little about the mechanics of interplanetary travel, at least no more than the average Europan nobleman learned at the New Milanese Academy. He could identify a decent number of stars and asterisms and do some basic calculations about impact velocities and the orbital characteristics of moons and planets, but his brother had been the one who idolized Newton and Brahe and Galileo. Prospero probably would have been able to tell them where the strange blast of solar wind had come from and why it hadn’t been detected by any of their radar, but of course Prospero had been exiled twelve terrayears ago by none other than Antonio himself.

He didn’t need Prospero to tell him that they were in trouble though, the spur of panic in the other man’s voice was enough to confirm his fears that they were one wrong move away from becoming space dust. This ship was the best in the queen’s fleet, but it wasn’t capable of much with all of its systems offline.

“If you won’t go to the escape pods, I suggest you take a seat and strap yourself in, my lord,” the captain said. “We’re in for a rather unpleasant landing.”

“Can you get us to Enceladus? There’s a Europan base by the geysers there—”

“Enceladus is on the other side of Saturn right now,” Sebastian said. “The only moon we might be able to make it to is Titan. I mean, we’re definitely going to make it to Titan, it’s right there in front of us, but the question is what shape we’re going to be in when we get to the surface.”

“But Titan isn’t terraformed—”

The captain whirled around to face Antonio. “I’m trying to land a ship without power on an unfamiliar moon. If you want to have any hope of surviving this, I suggest you shut up.”

“If we can get an escape pod out of the _Tempest_ , could we get any power back to it before we crash and slow our landing somehow?” Antonio whispered to Sebastian, clinging to his chair as the ship lurched again.

“Probably not. Titan doesn’t have a strong magnetic field to block the solar wind, and we’re probably all doomed from radiation poisoning anyways—”

“Has anyone seen Ferdinand?” Alonsa had gone ghostly white as everyone on the bridge shook their heads.

“Check the escape pods,” the captain suggested, probably partially because she truly believed Alonsa’s son, the Prince of Ganymede, might have had more sense than his mother and uncle and partially because it would get the Galilean nobility out of her hair.

Alonsa grabbed Antonio and Sebastian and dragged them off the bridge just as the last of the main lights flickered and died. The three managed to stumble through the corridors to the escape pods by the red glow panels of the backup emergency lights as the ship shuddered around them and began to pitch downward. Sebastian punched in the manual code to the pod and forced the door open just as the artificial gravity system failed and Antonio felt himself start to float, weightless, a few feet from the pod. Sebastian grabbed him and pulled him inside with Alonsa, slamming the door shut behind him.

Ferdinand was nowhere to be seen.

“He’s probably in one of the other pods,” Sebastian said as he strapped himself in.

“Any chance we’ll go into orbit and be able to fix this all from there?” Antonio grimaced, resisting the urge to throw up his lunch in Alonsa’s lap.

“We’re not coming in at the right speed or the right angle for that,” Sebastian said, oddly calm for someone in a ship about to crash on an uncolonized moon.

Antonio peered out the small slit of a window in the escape pod and watched with growing trepidation as the orangish clouds photochemical smog in Titan’s atmosphere flashed by. Sure, the pod would most likely survive the crash just fine with them inside it, but then what? How were they supposed to get off Titan again?

“What I don’t understand is how none of our radars registered the CME that caused this wind. Shouldn’t we have had at least a terramonth’s warning?” 

“We should have,” Antonio said through gritted teeth as he clutched the straps of his harness. “Didn’t you check the magnetics before we left the Neptunian system?”

“Of course I did,” Sebastian shot back. “I know how much havoc the solar wind can wreak on a ship, not to mention the people onboard. We’re supposed to get transmissions from the solar satellites to warn us about flares and prominences so we can turn on the generators for the magnetosphere in time to protect us from the solar wind. The system is actually based on the old Earth magnetosphere—Earth had a liquid iron core that moved when the Earth rotated and generated magnetic fields that helped to protect life on the surface from the solar wind. There’s a similar core in the engine room of this ship that we can activate to create our own mini magnetosphere around the ship in case of—”

Sebastian’s explanation was cut short as the escape pod broke free of the ship.

“Was that supposed to happen?!” Antonio yelled as they began tumbling through the atmosphere of Titan.

“Probably not,” Sebastian replied, still infuriatingly calm for someone who was about to be in the center of a rather large crater somewhere under the surface of Titan if the pod didn’t decrease in velocity soon. Perhaps his tranquility had something to do with how much better he had been at astrophysics and engineering than Antonio had been in school, although it probably had more to do with the fact that he actually knew how to manually operate the controls that would release the parachute-like apparatus that would lower them safely to the surface of Titan.

Except the parachute refused to deploy, no matter what Sebastian did.

“Well, this is it. We’re about to make a nice crater on the surface of Titan. The Galileans will probably name it after you, Alonsa, since you’re the queen, but maybe if there’s a nice mountain in the middle they’ll name it after poor Duke Antonio—”

And then the lights in the pod snapped back on.

“ _Full fathom five the old duke lies_ ,” a strange, robotic voice crooned from the speakers.

“ _Of his bones are dune lands made;_

_Those are lakes that shine like eyes:_

_Nothing of him that doth fade_

_But doth suffer from methane,_

_Becoming something rich and strange._

_Huygens hourly ring his knell,_

_Hark! now I hear them—Ding-dong, bell._ ”

Antonio was slammed against the side of the pod as the parachute finally deployed and slowed their descent just enough that they didn’t immediately become buried in the crust of Saturn’s largest moon when they hit the surface.

“What was that? Some kind of AI?”

“I have a name, you know,” the voice from the speakers said. “It’s Ariel.”

“Who programmed you? What are you doing in our system?” Antonio demanded.

“I’m not authorized to tell you that,” Ariel said. “I am authorized to say welcome to Titan. You will find the atmosphere here quite toxic to you. It’s mostly carbon and nitrogen, with traces of hydrogen cyanide. There is a sixty percent chance of methane rain today, becoming ethane by tonight. The temperature is currently -180 °C, I suggest you dress warmly. We hope you will enjoy your stay.” The speaker crackled and shut off.

“Okay… That must have come from the surface of Titan,” Sebastian said. “Which means there must be some kind of intelligent life down here.”

“Do you think it’s human?” Alonsa asked, peering out the window at a world of methane lakes and a thick nitrogen atmosphere—not exactly a human-friendly world.

“If it’s not human and it’s advanced enough to create some kind of AI system that can infiltrate our technology, we should have picked up some sort of communication from it before now,” Sebastian said. “Maybe there’s something here like the cryobacteria on Enceladus, but I bet that AI was made by a human. Maybe one who got stranded here—”

“Or exiled.”

“Do you think it’s Prospero?”

“I hope not. We didn’t exactly part on the best of terms.”

“Well, we’re going to have to go out there to find the rest of the ship. Maybe if that AI helped us land, it helped the others too,” Alonsa said, still looking out across the strange landscape of dunes and rivers. 

“Only one way to find out,” Sebastian said, pulling out a pile of suits that should protect them from the freezing temperatures on Titan’s surface and provide them with enough oxygen that they would be able to take in the scale of the mess they were in.

“I blame you for this, Alonsa,” grumbled Antonio as he struggled into the suit. “I could have been home on Europa, but no, I had to follow you halfway across the solar system to sit through your daughter’s wedding on Triton. It’s not exactly the most hospitable place in the solar system either, and I’m not just talking about the cryovolcanoes, thin nitrogen atmosphere, and lack of sunlight.”

“It’s not my fault the people there are all so short-tempered. You would be too if you lived on a moon where the temperature is only forty degrees Celsius above absolute zero.”

“Shut up and put on your suits,” Sebastian snapped.

The three humans gathered around the escape pod hatch.

“Once we open that, we lose whatever oxygen we have in here,” Sebastian warned them.

“We’ll lose it by staying in here and breathing it too,” Antonio pointed out. “We have enough of a supply in these tanks to last two terradays, right? That should be enough to find some sign of whatever made that AI.”

Sebastian kicked open the door of the pod, and the three of them stood there for a moment surveying the landscape before them. The sky was filled with rusty orange clouds, and a fine haze of methane rain was falling on the rocks outside. A thin methane stream trickled past them, winding its way through the rocks to an unseen lake somewhere beyond the horizon.

“It’s like Earth,” Sebastian gasped.

“How do you know that?” his sister countered. “You’ve never been to Earth. No one’s been to the terrestrial planets in decades.”

“I read some of the books Prospero left behind when he was exiled. Apparently water naturally existed in three states there—solid, liquid, and gas—just like the methane here. It seems like there’s some kind of geological activity here too, and a decent amount of hydrocarbons. Maybe there is some kind of native life here.”

“That doesn’t seem very likely—”

“Well then whose footprints are those?” Sebastian pointed to a trail of decidedly non-human tracks following the stream’s path that were slowly filling with methane rain and turning to mud. They were small, maybe the size of a dog, and seemed to belong to something that traveled on four legs with webbed feet. Maybe it was something that had evolved in the methane lakes and eventually adapted to survive on land, like life on Earth had done.

“What was that line from that old Earth play that Prospero used to quote all the time? The one he was named after?”

“O brave new world,” Antonio said quietly, cupping his gloved hands and letting the methane rain pool in them. He had never been on a world where it rained before. He’d heard stories about rain on Earth, but it didn’t exist on any of the Galilean moons. He didn’t know how long he was going to be stranded on Titan with Sebastian and Alonsa and this moon might very well be home to his exiled brother, but the atmosphere was made of nitrogen and the lakes were filled with methane and there was some kind of strange life form that had made its home there. It was like nowhere else in the solar system, and it was just waiting there for Antonio to explore it. “O brave new world,” he repeated. “Let’s go find out what my brother has done to it.”

**Author's Note:**

> Story time: this exists because I was once in an astronomy class where we were asked to "do something creative" for our final product using what we had learned during the semester... I've always wanted to stage a sci-fi production of Tempest (and hopefully someday I will), but for now, there's this.


End file.
